Streamer/Roon endpoint options

What’s the most stupid overpriced thing you could buy?

Oh, that is easy.

too hard/digital sounding for me.

must sound just like analogue.


bargain

Jesus, over 7k for a computer. I fucking hate this hobby sometimes.

yes, but it can copy your cd’s. Amazing.

y tho

Seriously, why do you all do this? I mean - aside from the delicous joy of Buying Stuff (oh yes, it is!), and the whole spunking digits into all 4 corners of your house - I mean for just listening to stuff off your computer - WTF is wrong with, like, a USB cable?

I do this, I listen to ripped CDs down 4m of moderately-Foo USB cable, with nothing special in the way of software, and even just that is a nose ahead of spinning the same CD into the same DAC…

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Gadgets and tinkerypokery, I’m running an amazon alexa in each room to control the lights and sonos stuff. Do I need it? not in the slightest, I tell alexa to switch the lights on and off even though the light switch is right by the door when i get home or go to bed.

Amazon echo, philips hue, nest or homeassistant don’t really offer any benefit whatsoever it’s just a toy.

It’s just electronic lego.

we don’t all do all this. I run a server (ish) machine for work stuff, it also stores my flac files, mp3 files (for the car and phone ), and runs roon. Squeeze boxes, and system output let me have the same music in the office, living room, bedroom, not yet kitchen but it will at some point. I would need many long usb leads to do that. I wish roon would stop trying to convince us that their software is really really special, and needs the very latest intel hardware and hard drives to run. No it bloody well doesn’t. The main reason I use roon rather than some other upnp server is the rather pretty interface, and tidal integration. As to all the million dollar audio computers, and the manufacturers trying to tell us how much better they are for music, can get tae fuck, it’s all data till it hits a DAC.

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I genuinely wondered if I was missing summat.

Nowt wrong with convenience. Personally, I don’t actually want to listen to music everywhere, all the time. I like to keep music as a special treat on a special system, albeit I have R3 chuntering away quietly in the background in the office.

Office :smiley:

Fully Funktional Fooatorium

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I have various Squeezeboxes - bedroom is a clock radio, kids have their own Boom boxes, kitchen is mostly a radio but can also play opera when I’m cooking Italian :blush:

I love the bondage wall :heart_eyes:

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Fun times up against the wipe clean surfaces…

Must admit there’s a lot more cra… er… advanced technology and audiophiliac desiderata in there now…

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Would the meatmen care to pick the flesh from the bones?

This morning I was looking at maybe buying another Sonos Connect:Amp, went to check the back connections on the Sonos site, and stumbled into this instead

Double the welly of the Connect:Amp, and critically it does HDMI ARC.

Meanwhile there’s a whole lot of hating going on in the comments on this video.

It looks lovely. It strikes me as great if you like Apple products - they work well, but you have to do things their way. And you pay for the pleasure.

I like to configure things my way (which changes regularly), so I go for my own solution. This currently comprises a touch screen four times the size of that one and a fifth the price, which does both the music player and digital crossover.

So my view is that if it suits what you want, and you’re the kind of person that fits what you want around a slick product, then it looks great. That’s not me, but then, neither are you :blush:

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I can’t recommend the Allo and HiFi Berry Raspberry Pi based renderers enough. For what amounts to pocket money you can get a very competent streamer/Roon endpoint. Just add a DAC of your choice. Setup is so simple as to be idiot proof (important in my case). I’ve also used an Allo DAC/Streamer (details here) which I didn’t get on with largely because I thought the DAC was a bit harsh.

I recently picked up a Lumin D1 streamer with a foo linear power supply for not a lot of money on eBay so that is my current weapon of choice. I don’t really use the Lumin app for anything other than internet radio as I have a lifetime subscription to Roon, but as a package the Lumin is as good as I have had here (Naim NDS, Simaudio Moon MiND 180, Squeezbox Touch, Simpleaudio Player 1, Raspberry Pi etc.). The next best unit is the MiND device from Simaudio, which I moved on because I wanted to use Roon and TIDAL. The Lumin also is MQA compliant, which is a bonus, but not something I would ordinarily pay for.

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That looks interesting, I’ve got a connect amp in the bedroom with some little Dali speakers and think it sounds better than a Naim Unitiqute.

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